The DUP is to send two senior representatives to today's Somme commemoration in Dublin. Dan Keenan and Stephen Collins report
A spokesman for the party announced last night that South Down Assembly member Jim Wells and Lord Wallace Brown, last year's lord mayor of Belfast, would attend the first State commemoration of the battle, which raged from July to November 1916.
The confirmation that the DUP will attend ends a week of uncertainty about the participation of the largest unionist party.
The event is being held at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge and will be led by President Mary McAleese, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Vincent Jackson.
The two DUP representatives are said to be "happy to accept" invitations to attend the Government's reception afterwards. The Ulster Unionists and SDLP will also send delegations, as will Sinn Féin.
A host of dignitaries from both parts of Ireland and abroad will take part in the commemoration at Islandbridge today to mark the 90th anniversary of the battle.
A wreath will be laid by President McAleese and by the ambassadors from the eight countries which fought in the battle - Britain, France, Germany, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, India and Australia.
Nigel Hamilton, head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, will lay a wreath as will a representative of the Royal British Legion.
The main commemoration in Northern Ireland will take place at the Cenotaph in the grounds of Belfast City Hall. Lord Maurice Morrow will lead the DUP attendance, while party leader Ian Paisley and his wife, Baroness Eileen Paisley, will join commemorations in northern France as will Northern Secretary Peter Hain.
Mayors, council chairs and councillors will also attend local commemoration ceremonies across Northern Ireland. A Sinn Féin spokesman said last night that it would not attend the commemoration in Belfast, calling instead for the Belfast event to be modelled on the Dublin ceremony, "which shows how it should be done".
There is close unionist identity with the soldiers of the Ulster Division. Of the nine Victoria Crosses awarded to British soldiers for acts of bravery on July 1st, 1916, four went to soldiers in the Ulster Division, which suffered 5,104 casualties, including 2,069 killed in the first two days.
The stirring words of Marshal Foch, the allied commander in the first World War, honouring the sacrifice made by Irish soldiers in the defence of his country, will be read out today by an Army officer at the Somme commemoration in Dublin.
"They have left to those who come after a glorious heritage and an inspiration to duty that will live long after their names are forgotten," said the marshal in 1928 at the 10th anniversary of the end of the war. "France will never forget her debt to the heroic Irish dead, and in the hearts of the French people today their memory lives as that of the memory of the heroes of old, preserved in the tales that the old people tell to their children and their children's children."
He said that on the Somme in 1916, he had seen the heroism of the Irish. "I saw Irishmen of the North and the South forget their age-long differences and fight side by side, giving their lives freely for the common cause."